I haven't seen a topic dedicated to giving your opinion on the game, so here goes. That's how I discovered it.

It's been sitting on my Wishlist, along with many other games that I might get to one day, since the Steam Exploration Queue suggested it to me one day. I already have a lot of games gathering dust on my To Play list in my library, from neat indie games to AAA titles, so I was in no hurry to get it.

However, toward the end of the Steam Sales I took a look through my Wishlist to see if I should get anything (the discount don't really matter when you don't even have the time to play the games you already have, though) and that's when I realized that Black Closet was made by Hanako Games. I enjoyed Long Live the Queen so much that I ended up buying Black Closet even though I knew I wouldn't have any time to play it: my reasoning was that even if I didn't play Black Closet, Hanako Game deserved the money for making LLtQ such a good game (I feel kinda bad for buying it at such a discount now).

Since I had bought it, I decided to try it because I was curious. I didn't have the time to play it (I literally had 87 games ahead of it on my list of games I want to play as soon as possible) but I wanted to know how it went. I haven't been able to stop playing.

It's not what I was hoping for, the screenshots made it look like a card game, and the mention of minions made me think I would play evil overlord ordering expendable henchwomen to do my bidding. Turns out you don't build a hand of minions from a deck of many such creatures, they are 5 fully fleshed out characters with interesting personalities and backgrounds. It's more of an RPG team who just happen to be represented as cards rather than portraits on a sidebar. And your items are similarly more of an inventory.

This means that this game is more of a RPG where the gameplay mechanic is investigation rather than combat. Which is not bad, I love RPGs. In fact, I used to dream about a RPG with deep and replayable investigation (or social interaction) mechanics. But I realized long ago that it wasn't realistic and would be to complicated to make. So in the end, this is a game I didn't even dare to hope find one day.

So ... thanks, Hanako Games. I didn't get the game I wanted when I bought it –actually, scratch that, I did. I bought it to get a cool game like LLtQ and it totally delivered on that front*. So, starting over: I didn't get the game I wanted when I first put it on my Wishlist, but what I got instead was much much better. The sort of game I wouldn't have known to look for or hope to find.

* The compelling characters, beautiful design, brilliant subversion of a (moderately) common game genre, engaging branching storyline, complex consequences for my actions, deep stat system, and excellent writing that made me enjoy Long Live the Queen so much more than I was expecting to are all there in Black Closet.